Student-produced fifth semester work from a fieldwork trip to the informal city on the periphery of Maputo, Mozambique, East Africa.

Emil Seehusen and the Royal Academy initiated the month-long field trip, which continues today as an integrated component of the Institute for Landscape and Urbanism at the Royal Academy, bachelor program.

The purpose of the field trip was to explore how novel notation forms and techniques could be applied to uncover states of constant urban transformation not visible in normative forms of static drawing representation. The project claims that western classical forms of representation such as typological plan drawings or figure-ground dichotomies are ill-equipped to register the dynamism of the informal city of Maputo and informal cities in the global south generally. In so far that drawings are ways of seeing, they preestablish meaning and project interpretations which inhibit learning. Instead, students reflected on the confluence of seeing and making, drawing and projecting.

Students invented new notations forms, enabling a more close reading of the formless and provisional informal city. Students were tasked to present a photograph taken during the daily excursions, accompanied with a word and the latest development of a single drawing which they would itinerate throughout the one-month-long stay. The differentiation between the immediacy of the snapshot and the month-long development of a single drawing explored relations between planning strategies and eye height perspective, and daily change in the informal city. Further, students produced a daily word, which would indicate a conceptual link between image and drawing, which together began to comprise a dictionary over the informal condition in Maputo.

The informal city of Maputu, and its location at the perifery of Maputo.

Students were asked to produce a new image and work daily, in conjunction with progress on a single drawing developed over a month-long period. Each day would begin with free time spend in the informal city, followed by roughly four hours of drawing time, and ending the day with presentations often lasting several hours.

Students were tasked with inventing forms of notations, enabling a more close reading of the particularly formless and provisional informal city.

These notation forms consisted primarily of images and drawings. Students were tasked to present a photograph taken during the daily excursions, accompanied with a word and the latest development of a single drawing they would itinerate throughout the one-month-long stay.

The differentiation between the immediacy of the snapshot and the month-long development of a single drawing explored relations between planning strategies and eye height perspective, and daily change in the informal city. The daily word would indicate a conceptual link between image and drawing.